On my system, I don't need to capitalize the "L", I just press
"l" to flip the stem.

In order to select notes in any measure I like; however, I've had to
come up with a bit of a unique procedure.

Check that you have your desired layer selected in the lower left
corner of the application.

Use the simple entry tool and select the value of a note in the
measure you'd like to work on.

"Re-enter" a note in the measure by clicking on it.

Use the right arrow key to activate the simple entry caret.

Navigate using the right and left arrow keys to your desired notes
and modify the note as desired (in this case by pressing "l"
to flip each note)

To avoid needing to flip any stems, I am going to use layers 1
and 2 exclusively. It might be my system, however, only layers 1 and
2 seem to be "behaving" properly. What I mean is that when
writing in layer 1 or 2, the layer automatically adjusts the stem
direction "more or less" properly. I'd have to check go
fairly deep to find out what stem direction rules Finale NotePad follows,
but wow, what an interesting question! I'll remember to ask that at
the forum! Another reason for my use of layers 1 and 2 is that when
I add notes into a second layer, the notes of the other layer flip
"correctly."

Just to make things clear...I certainly don't expect everyone to just
enter my song into NotePad, you can do so if you like, or you can
just enter your own music!

I'm finished with experimentation for now, and I've found a procedure
that will work...at least for a while...so on with it.

I'm going to clean up my experiments (the notes and measures I don't
want) by using the Mass Edit Tool. You can just hover over the icons
in the "Main Tool Palette."

If you need to find an icon, I suggest horizontally moving your cursor
from left to right over the Palette and watching the words appear.

If you don't know which toolbar is the "Main Tool Palette,"
select and deselect the various Palettes in the Window menu (or right-click
in an "unoccupied" sector of the "Palette Area").
I'm calling the "Palette Area" the gray area surrounding
all of the palettes at the top of the application window (under the
File, Edit, View, Options, etc. "Main Menu").

I deleted the first measure by selecting it using the Mass Edit
tool and pressing Delete on my keyboard. In my first measure, as you
can see above, the low e is black (layer 1), and the higher e is red...if
I continued with such a layer structure I'd be flipping a whole lot
of stems!

You can learn techniques to speed up your notation process in my eBook
"How to Write
Your Songs Down." The techniques can be applied to notation
by hand or computer!

I removed the rest of my excess notes by selecting multiple measures
(select first measure with the Mass Edit Tool, then Shift-click on
the last measure...this works across multiple staves), and then pressing
CTRL+X.

Now I have a clean slate to work with:

I notice a bit of a Finale flaw, and that's the non-flagged stems
being too short...another one for the forum, but let's continue...

My plan is to notate both hands and the opening lyrics for now, just
to get a feel for everything, and then I'll do each hand separately, concluding
with entering the lyrics.

I've made some progress.

A couple things are "goofy" and I can't find "grace note"
in the help. The commercial Finale keystroke ";" does not work
to create a grace note, so unless I'm missing something, one is not able
to create grace notes in Finale Notepad. There are a couple of different
options I could explore for the way the bass notes work and how I hold
the harmony notes in the right hand, but I'm just tossing things up there
for now.

If you've made it this far, it just struck me that I'd like to ask you
if you find it useful that I use a song of mine for this tutorial. I'll
face notation challenges particular to this song, yet the way I work through
those challenges might be helpful for you...any feedback, comments, or
suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I decided to notate the song in Finale, and now it's time to re-create
the professional score as well as possible in Notepad.

Here are three pages of my sheet music, as created in Finale:

We're getting there, we now have our goal: to recreate the pages above
using Finale Notepad.

I'll have to look into the best way to depict music online. Maybe there's
an EPS viewer or something like that. It would be nice if visitors could
click on and enlarge the notation examples, since they look a bit small
to me...your suggestions are most welcome!